Signature Bank and Tectonic Engineering & Surveying Consultants have each signed a 10-year lease for space at Muss Development‘s Forest Hills Tower, a 375,000-square-foot office tower in the Forest Hills area of Queens.

Tectonics, a civil and structural engineering firm, and the bank will take a combined 17,782 square feet in the building, at 118-35 Queens Boulevard, which used to be JetBlue’s headquarters, Crain’s first reported.
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If a boutique hotel in the South Bronx wasn’t enough to raise eyebrows, an offshoot of the slick Standard hotel empire at John F. Kennedy International Airport should do the trick.

The New York Postreported yesterday that the Port Authority selected Andre Balazs‘ hotel group to develop JFK’s TWA terminal, the modern architectural triumph masterminded in the late 1950s by Eero Saarinen.
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Miami native Rick Rosa stuffed a few bags with his belongings in 1999 and headed for New York City.

Though not the postcard image he envisioned, he stumbled upon the industrial waterfront neighborhood of Long Island City, where he found an affordable pad, close to Manhattan, with a yard for his dog, Benny.

The whirlwind negotiations between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Muss Development to create an impromptu relief outpost in Queens in the days following Hurricane Sandy’s descent on New York would not have happened had it not been for one of the real estate industry’s leading dynasties.

In a deal that would later come to symbolize the overall dedication of the city’s real estate titans, government officials and executives banged out terms for 200,000 square feet of temporary space at the Forest Hills Tower in a mere five days, a minor miracle in the world of office leasing.
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The advertising and media firm Publicis has signed a nearly 100,000-square-foot lease to relocate Manhattan offices to Long Island City.

The company, a large multinational firm that occupies hundreds of thousands of square feet in the city, is taking space at the Brause Realty-owned 27-01 Queens Plaza North in a sublease from the insurance firmRead More

The Queens District Attorney’s Office is considering a large lease in Forest Hills, Queens in offices that used to be occupied by the major airline JetBlue, several sources told The Commercial Observer.

The office of the Queen’s DA, Richard Brown, is in talks to lease approximately 180,000 square feet at Forest Hills Tower, space that was formerly leased by JetBlue, which decided last year to relocate from the 500,000-square-foot building to Long Island City.
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Mr. Brause: Back in 2001 we net-leased the entire building, the Brewster building—400,000 square feet—to MetLife Insurance Company. Two years later, they exercised an option for us to build out another 300,000 square feet in the rear parcel Read More

Aside from millions in city and state tax breaks, as part of the deal that kept JetBlue from absconding to Florida, the airline will receive certain rights to the slogan “I ♥ NY.” JetBlue will sublease 200,000 square feet from MetLife in Long Island City’s Brewster building, owned by Brause Realty, led by Read More